Yes, that's the right report. I should note that it's a very bare-bones summary of the practices they found at the schools in question; ECF will have a more complete version, which includes citations related to the value of these practices, in the next month or two.

ECF will have a more complete version, which includes citations related to the value of these practices, in the next month or two.

Hi, Brett!

Thanks so much for posting. I was blown away by the executive summary, which I'll forward to our school board & administration. I think it's going to be very helpful, in part because the board is really thinking about these issues. Informally, board members have been asking parents about the tutoring situation here (with many parents hiring teachers in the district to tutor their kids).

The cumulative effect of the summarized points is powerful.

Nowhere do you see "School tells parent to hire tutor" --- but beyond this you see, in all of the bulletted points, the school assuming responsibility for student achievement.

Guy Bruce (author of the report) picked these schools from a pool of 18, which were the winners of this year's Value-Added Achievement Awards (an annual award program from the ECF). I don't know why the ones he selected were mostly high-poverty, but I do believe there were some affluent schools among the winners. I'll see if I can find that information to verify.

On a related note, we did look at the correlation between value-added achievement and free/reduced lunch status, and found almost no correlation (R=.0012). You can see the scatterplot by going to http://www.education-consumers.com/ecf_vaaa_about.php and scrolling down to Section II and opening the "Poverty versus Performance Chart" (a PDF file).

Again, I'll look for those numbers on the winners - I'm pretty sure they weren't all high-poverty.

I ran the numbers, and it looks like a good spread among the winning schools - the lowest free/reduced lunch rate was 20.6%, the highest was 97.0%, and the majority were in the 40-70% range. Seems like a fairly normal distribution, given that the average of all Tennessee schools is 57.6%.

Once we start talking about instructional difference at high/low poverty schools, we're out of my range of knowledge. I believe there are differences in approach, but you should talk with someone with more knowledge in the area than me. I'd encourage you to touch base with John Stone of ECF; his contact information can be found on the site.

But I do know that gathering and using data at all levels has great value. Even though Tennessee reports only school-level TVAAS data publicly, administrators and teachers can access reports at the teacher level (to see which teachers are producing gains) and at the student level. In fact, schools are supposed to make students' data available to parents, which would be fantastic: find out now, rather than later, whether your child is on track to succeed in college. Unfortunately this rarely happens as I understand it - parents don't know about it and schools don't volunteer it.